Something of interest?

[Apollo]

I just downloaded the latest rom file for robotron and used it with mame .86 and it works perfectly. Just thought that might be useful info for some here.

[Joystick Jerk]

Not that surprising. While minor changes have been made since, Robotron has been considered fully working as of Mame .25. Most roms generally don't change over time once they've been promoted to working status. It's the changes to mame itself that can affect how the game plays. You could download a full romset audited for .115, and the vast majority would work just fine with .86, or even earlier versions.

[SGT]

You can go to the Maws database and see what changes have been made to specific games.

http://www.mameworld.net/maws/


Judging from the WIP for Robotron, there have been changes since .86:

WIP:

0.106u11: Aaron Giles added X and Y offset/scale controls for each screen. This allows you to control the actual position of the screen within its container. In order to see beyond the game-configured visible area, the game must have set up the screen size to be larger than the core visible area. The Williams drivers have been updated as an example. Eugene Jarvis mentioned that if you adjust your monitor, you can see the stack in Robotron off to the right, and now you can in MAME as well. The values configured in the OSD are saved in the config file for each game.
0.95u3: Changed cpu1 roms addresses from $0-8000 to $10000-18000.
0.92: Highwayman added proms ($0, $200 - video inversion for cocktail table).
0.30: Valerio Verrando added clone Robotron (Yellow/Orange label), where quarks are incorrectly called Cubeoids during the demo.
0.25: Valerio Verrando fixed the Williams driver to support joystick in Blaster, Defender, Joust, Robotron, Splat and Stargate.
0.24: Marc LaFontaine provided drivers for Robotron, Splat, Defender, Joust, Stargate, Bubbles, Blaster and Sinistar. Bubbles doesn't start, and Sinistar do weird things at startup. The other games work very well, though. For this version I provide a set of fonts that can be used to avoid jerkiness in williams games.
0.23: Added Robotron (Williams 1982). Controls don't work right yet. Steven Hugg provided a Williams games driver. Stargate, Robotron and Joust are currently supported and playable.

[u_rebelscum]

You can go to the Maws database and see what changes have been made to specific games....

MAWS is a great source of lots of info...

Judging from the WIP for Robotron, there have been changes since .86...

If you look at the roms info section, maws lists all versions the romset was changed from 0.53 on.  There was only one change since 0.53:

data
      version added     .023
      last change(s)    .092
          roms ...


The notes you show include changes to the driver also, but only this part corresponds with changes in the romset.

0.92: Highwayman added proms ($0, $200 - video inversion for cocktail table).

Since it was adding proms to the set, the current set still work with mames before the change, but not vice versa.

edit: fixed quotes

[Apollo]

I was under the impression there was a speed issue fixed in .99? I'm not 100% sure but it seems to run a little slower, certainly the first 2 levels that I played seemed easier.